Asif Kapadia: ‘There aren’t many people as complicated as Maradona’

Asif Kapadia – the renowned filmmaker responsible for the acclaimed Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona documentaries – was given an Outstanding Achievement Award at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival.

The 42nd edition of the festival honoured the experienced writer/director, whose films have garnered BAFTAs, Oscars and Grammys, by presenting him with the award at the screening of his hugely successful 2010 documentary, Senna, on the evening of Saturday, October 21, at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge.

Other Asif Kapadia movies were also shown at this year’s festival, namely his first full-length drama, The Warrior (2001), his 2022 piece, The Creature, a collaboration with choreographer Akram Khan, and his widely-praised documentary Diego Maradona (2019) about the Argentinian footballing icon, who died in 2020.

A few hours before the Senna screening, Asif, 51, spoke to the Cambridge Independent at the Gonville Hotel. I started by congratulating him on the award.

“Thank you, I’m very honoured, very nice – sign of getting old I suppose as well!” he laughs, “but I’ve been around a while now so it’s a really nice thing to be given and offered. Nice to be here again.”

Elaborating on that, the London-born filmmaker recalls: “I think my first film The Warrior showed here – a few of my films have showed here and I remember coming here years ago to just do Q&As, but not part of the festival. I think I might have done an event with Diego Maradona, but it’s all pre-Covid...”

So Asif got to know Diego Maradona, scorer of the infamous ‘Hand of God’ goal against England at the 1986 World Cup, a little bit?

“I did. I went to his house at the time,” he replies. “He was living in Dubai so I met him a few times.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say I got to know him but I met him quite a few times and I interviewed him – he’s quite hard to get to know.”

Maradona, a World Cup winner in 1986, and in my opinion the greatest footballer to have ever played the game, once said of another Argentine football legend, Lionel Messi: “He is a great person, but he has no personality” – something that could never be said of Maradona.

“If it’s possible to have too much [personality], Diego had a bit too much of everything going on,” suggests Asif, “for my generation of football fans, because of what he did was so different, for me in my era, he was the best.

“And then afterwards football changes, the rules change, you can’t foul anyone, pitches change, how many foreign players you can have in a team changes, where all the money’s gone changed…

“So then it becomes, in my opinion, a bit easier to be brilliant, because you don’t get kicked and injured as much as you used to in the old days. The pitches are better, all of that, so you can have a much longer career.

“Whereas when I was younger, no one could play until they were 40 because your knees have gone!”

Asked which other footballers he might like to make a documentary about, Asif says: “I’m not doing the film about him, I think someone else is doing it, but I always thought Johan Cruyff was an interesting character, and there are a few other players…

“I think it’s quite hard to top Diego Maradona – there’s not many people who are as complicated as he was. I’m as much interested in the character as opposed to ‘who’s the best ever’, that’s the thing. So with Diego, he just had a hell of a lot going on, and he happened to be amazing.”

When making his award-winning documentaries, Asif fully immerses himself in the person whose story he’s telling, noting that the process for making Senna took about five years, Diego Maradona around three, and the process for Amy – his hit 2015 film on Amy Winehouse – was also about three years.

“Seeing as we’re in Cambridge, I would describe it as if I’m doing my PhD in a character,” he explains, “you sort of watch everything, you study them, I look at them, I listen to them, we read everything – so much material, that for a short period of time I know so much about a person, often whom I’ve never met.

“And then you become quite obsessed and you dream about them – and then out of all of that information, the job is to then condense it down to make a movie, and how you make it into an interesting film is a whole different thing.

“Senna was the first doc that I made so it was really learning the process and kind of creating a style, which then my films became known for.

“So Senna came first, then Amy, then Diego Maradona, so by Maradona it was, ‘Okay, now it’s slightly different because he’s around and I can interview him’.

“Never got to meet Senna, never got to meet Amy, so I made films about people who were not around – so I had to try to understand them by putting together, connecting the dots, fragments of their life, via people who were close to them and via the material.

“So it’s part investigative journalism, part detective work, part creative, part business. There’s a lot of different hats that you have to wear, or that I choose to wear the way I make films, because it’s really quite forensic how we go into trying to understand them and their characters.”

Asif adds: “I thought Senna was amazing and really a fantastic character, and I’ll be honest, I would say Senna, I kind of fell in love with him as I was making it.

“He felt like such an incredible guy, just everything he stood for, everything he cared about, everything he said and did and the way he was as a human being…

“I said the same with Amy; once I understand who she really was and heard her and saw her and how funny she was and how talented, I thought she was great.

“Diego’s different – Diego’s quite hard to fall in love with because he’s quite challenging.

“But on that film, we did something different, which was because he was such a complicated character, there were like two sides of his personality – this idea of ‘Diego’ and ‘Maradona’.

“Maradona being the megastar and Diego being the kid. I really liked Diego but I’m not sure I met Diego, if that makes sense – by then he was 100 per cent Maradona.

“The young, innocent kid that he starts off as was long gone, but I think he had a full-on life. He came from a really rough place – you wouldn’t get a cab driver to take you there now. You could only go past it if you were with a friend who knew Buenos Aires.

“It’s amazing where he came from and where he ended up, and also understandable therefore why things turned out the way they did.

“If you give someone from there everything, and spoil them, then there’s a possibility life might get out of control.”

At present, Asif is working on a “few things which are in their early stages” and reveals: “The [documentary] film that I’m on right now is not a biog, I’m doing something slightly different.

“It’s more of a state-of-the-world project and what’s going on everywhere, and not just following one character, so it’s slightly a change of style.”